Andrew N Flood

A few hours ago the referendum campaign in Ireland took an unexpected turn when google announced it was banning all referendum based advertising across all its platforms including Youtube. The howls of outrage from the anti-choice No campaign has been going on ever since.

This reaction across the No campaigns is telling. For the first time spokespeople are posting about No losing the referendum & suggesting the whole vote is rigged. Which makes you wonder what nasty online ads they were intending to run in the last 10 days?

Over the last few days the mainstream media in Ireland has finally woken up to the way money from far right US evangelicals is being used to buy the No vote in the referendum campaign. Here we show you how to see how you are being targeted and discuss what this means for the referendum and any conception of democracy not based on the ‘one dollar, one vote’ favoured by the elite.

The referendum to remove the clause in the constitution that limits what medical care, including abortion, women in Ireland can access approaches at the end of this month. With another poll appearing this morning we have updated our graph of how that May 25th vote would look IF the polling companies had a similar margin as they had for the Marriage Equality referendum a couple of years back. As you can see they suggest if nothing changes the result of the May 25th, Repeal vote will be too close to call until the count on the 26th.

As the referendum to remove the 8th amendment approaches in Ireland the No campaign are turning to increasingly nasty shock tactics. The 8th amendment passed in 1983 removes healthcare control from pregnant people and puts it in the hands of the courts, it was inserted to ban abortion but in fact impacts every aspect of pregnancy.

The Dublin May Day march last night took place in miserable weather conditions, the parade was led off the Trade Union Repeal the 8th banners - Repeal was one of the march themes and copies of a newspaper aimed at trade unionists called Yes Repeal were also distributed.

Another Dublin May Day theme was working rights for migrants following the farcical new rules that supposedly give asylum seekers a right to work but which in practice few qualify under and which require too much paper work for employers to bother with for a 6 month contract.

There are many strange things about the anti-choice bigots trying to protect the antiquated status quo of the 8th amendment - a piece of text inserted into the constitution at the moment when the power of that old clerical Ireland was about to crumble.

Perhaps out of frustration with their failure on last night's Late Late Show (Apr 27th), the anti-choice No campaigns have stooped to a disgusting new low today. We've observed that they have been engaged in setting up apparently innocuous Facebook news pages and we presumed it was in connection with the referendum. Today they changed the cover image of one of these pages to make it look like a Yes campaign page and then posted this disgusting post.

Saturday 7th April saw 3000 people take to the streets of Dublin for the Housing is a Human Right march. Some 10,000 people are in emergency accommodation, 3700 of them children. Meanwhile landlords & property speculators pocket a massive portion of the wages of those who are working either via rent or if post 2000 'homeowners' through massive morgage payments.

The Sunday Times with Behaviour & Attitudes have run two very useful polls that give a strong sense of how the campaign to Repeal the 8th Referendum is going. The overall story the poll results tell is bad for the Vote No campaign and promising for the Vote Yes campaign. If the referendum had been held at the time of the March poll then Repeal would have been carried by 64% to 36%, almost 2:1. The polling data also shows No has a soft vote that is very much larger proportion than the equivalent soft Yes vote. This means if anything between now and referendum day the polls are likely to drift towards repeal.

None of this is a reason for complacency, what the No side lacks in terms of numbers and support they make up for in terms of funding. Before the campaign had even started they were spending hundreds of thousands on online advertising, billboards, leaflets and free buses to what had to be their disappointingly small March 10th national march. Together for Yes may have far more support and more people out canvassing but will it have enough to defeat all that paid advertising?

We've seen a number of Irish journalists wondering if Cambridge Analytica style tactics could be part of repeal referendum. In fact they already are and have been for over a year - we are going to demonstrate this in what follows.

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